By Jen Jay

As Eugene’s current SLUG queen, you’d think I’d be used to slippery situations. 

Nothing felt slimier than being asked to promote a radio station featuring Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. There are many things a SLUG queen can gracefully glide over — puddles, moss, the occasional gnome — but bigotry is not one of them.

So, I quit my job at Cumulus Media.

Not dramatically. No microphone drop, no slime-trail exit from the building. Just a simple truth: I could not, as a queer person, represent programming that routinely attacks my community. I couldn’t hand out swag for people who’d debate whether I deserve the same rights as everyone else. Not to mention, their hate speech toward queer and trans University of Oregon students. 

Some people will say I’m being too sensitive. That it’s “just a promo gig,” or “just radio.” When the content in question actively undermines your humanity, it is personal, and time to clarify where the boundary is. There were small compromises suggested — “It’s just set up and breakdown,” “You don’t have to stay for the actual event.” They all add up. Compromises like that over time teach us to shrink.

We’re at a cultural moment where the messages we amplify matter more than ever. Entertainment, politics and propaganda have merged into a single media ecosystem where everything we give our labor to becomes part of the narrative. Eugene likes to imagine itself as a progressive terrarium full of ferns and good intentions, but even here harmful ideas are syndicated, monetized and aired daily. 

The hopeful part is this: We don’t have to help spread them.

Change doesn’t only come from marches or elections. It also comes from people making small, inconvenient decisions to honor their own integrity. My resignation won’t topple a media empire, or even get the programming on KUGN changed, but it does strengthen something closer to home, my sense of what I will and will not support.

If more of us start drawing these lines — refusing to promote, platform or normalize those who harm our communities — we create a ripple. A shift. A collective refusal to be complicit. That’s how cultures transform: by countless tiny acts of courage accumulating into something undeniable.

If you’re on the fence about standing up, drawing a boundary or stepping away from something that chips at your values, consider this your gentle nudge from a fancy-dressed forest mollusk.

Ooze the change you want to see in the world, and take gnome-mercy.

Jen Jay, aka Hilaria Gastrognome, is the 43rd Society for the Legitimization of the Ubiquitous Gastropod queen, who has won and been in the top three placing repeatedly in Eugene Weekly’s Best Comedian category in Best of Eugene.